Tongue

Where I’m from, there’s no way to take desire apart, to separate it from the self that speaks its name, the spell is the soothsayer so I’m careful when I say he was studying to build planes or he wore blue jeans or he liked to cook the stew best of all. Torching my tongue is tasting the soup, naming is the claiming of the thing. My people are a hungry one, we say I want and mean all of it. I fooled myself into thinking cloaking it in code would stifle the sting. All it does is make the ache bloom elsewhere, like taking an ax to the floorboards of an attic in a house already shaking in a hurricane.